Why did you make a comic about an aborted fetus?
I mean, yes, what was I thinking? Here’s the rationale I wish I could give.
A lot of good horror stories are moral anxiety writ large (see also: Frankenstein and humanity’s attempt to put nature on the rack). And I think it’s fair to say that there is moral anxiety about abortion.
I think there is a reason why Hillary Clinton called it “a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women;” why President Obama expressed his belief in The Audacity of Hope that “few women made the decision to terminate a pregnancy casually; that any woman felt the full force of the moral issues involved and wrestled with her conscience when making that heart-wrenching decision.”
Keyes knows that most women refer to the developing lives inside of them as “babies,” rather than fetuses, whether they’re conflicted about their abortions or not. She knows that occasionally women want to keep sonograms of the fetuses they’ve aborted and even ask to see their reassembled remains once the procedure’s through. (This is standard medical procedure, in order to make sure all the parts have been removed.) While many of her clinic patients are at peace with their decision, others are not, and she’s got piles of loose-leaf binders containing pink hearts inscribed with messages to husbands, boyfriends, parents, God (“A lot are to God”), and the never-born that express those feelings of uncertainty – like this one, written in the bubble handwriting of a teen who had accompanied her friend:
“To the unborn child, Know that your mom made the choice to keep you in heaven and this was not easy for us. (I was her support.)” At the end of each counseling session, Keyes offers women a basket of stones from which to choose and make a wish. In early 2008, she built a small sanctuary in her clinic so that women and their partners could “say a final good-bye or a prayer, or just to sit quietly and not think anything at all.”
I think abortion is “heart-wrenching” because something dies in an abortion – something that, ordinarily, would eventually grow into what everybody agrees is a human person. Some people think this “something” is a human person from the moment of conception. Others think it is a human person only after it leaves its mother’s body. Many others fall somewhere in between, and believe that abortion should be legal, but restricted in this or that way.
Why do they fall somewhere in between? I don’t think it’s absurd to suggest that it’s because they’re uncertain. Yes, they affirm a woman’s right to choose whether or not to carry her pregnancy to term. But… something dies, something that, ten weeks into the pregnancy, has hands and a face. They’re uncertain about just what that something is. And from that uncertainty arises moral anxiety: if the fetus is not a person, then we need not worry overmuch about disposing of it. But if the fetus is a person, then abortion is a moral horror.
My comic series Alphonse takes that horror – that notion that hovers over many facets of the debate – and makes it overt. It imagines a fetus whose personhood is so manifest that he has the faculties of a fully developed adult. A fetus who is consumed with rage after suffering betrayal at the most fundamental level, and who vows revenge on those who sought to take his life. Alphonse is literally a monster – “a fetus or an infant that is grotesquely abnormal and usually not viable” – one I hope bears some of the perversely prophetic character of the freaks who populate Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. (Think of the Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” or the club-footed boy in “The Lame Shall Enter First.”) He is my attempt at what O’Connor would call a “large and startling figure,” whose grotesque character upsets the ordinary way of the world.
And like the Misfit, he is not the center of the story, not really. Everybody remembers Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs, but of course, the story is really about a damaged young woman’s attempt to silence the demons that have haunted her from youth. (“Have the lambs stopped screaming, Clarice?”) So yeah, Alphonse is the monster who makes the cover, but Alphonse is very much the story of eight lives that intersect after an attempted abortion. It is not a polemic, not a treatise, not a piece of propaganda. It is, I hope, a good horror story.
* * *
As I said, that’s the rationale I wish I could give. But even though I think all of the above is true, it’s also hindsight. It’s not where Alphonse came from. I didn’t sit down and wonder, “How can I best explore the moral anxiety surrounding abortion in a fictional setting?” That’s not how inspiration works-not for me, at least.
It started with Pixy, a 1993 graphic novel by Max Andersson. From the promo copy:
Alka Seltzer and Angina Pectoris have all the luck – bad, that is. They’ve been ejected into the street because their apartment was put to sleep, Angina had to abort their child (the result of a malfunctioning Safe-Sex bodysuit) – how could it get worse? When a friendly stranger offers them his apartment, things seem to be looking up… but then Angina gets a call from the Netherworld. It’s her aborted fetus: he’s drunk and he’s pissed off. So begins Pixy, which Neil Gaiman calls “the best comic I’ve read this year.”
Me, I never got past that devastating phone call from the Netherworld. I closed the book and put it back on the shelf at the comic shop. But the image stayed with me.
That was the beginning. And I confess to feeling a serious twinge when I watched Kill Bill Vol. 2 and saw the Bride instantly transformed by the realization that she was pregnant. ”Before that strip turned blue, I was a killer who killed for you. But once that strip turned blue, I could no longer do any of those things. Not any more. Because I was going to be a mother.” (I don’t know if it’s permissible to have earnest emotional responses during Tarantino’s movies. Can’t help it.)
But things really took off with Umbert. Longtime readers of Gawker may recall the site’s mention of a comic strip character called Umbert the Unborn. Umbert is a fetus in utero who is endowed with reason, will and detailed knowledge of the world outside the womb-including legalized abortion. Umbert is clearly intended to be sweet and endearing (and too adorable to abort), but he got me to thinking - what if it were true? What if there was a fetus who really was sentient, who was suspended upside down in the dark, and who knew he was slated for termination? What would that do to a person? I figured it would leave him deeply twisted-consumed by fear and rage, but also desperate for love. That’s Alphonse.
My little monster stayed with me. I made one sketch, then another. And then, all at once, the first page of a comic. I am not much of an artist, but I hung on to that page. Eventually, I wrote a script for that opening scene. And then for the whole story. Long story short: three years after that first sketch, I decided to self-publish. I begged enough money from friends and relatives to hire an artist and letterer for my first issue. These days, I’m begging again.
I don’t imagine that Alphonse is going to change anyone’s mind about abortion, and that’s okay. That’s not why I wrote it. Rather, I was trying to make a work of art (however minor) that would do some of the things that art does – reflect experience, engage imagination, and just maybe, enlarge perspective.
A version of this essay first appeared in The Awl.
